.png)
Anyone who attends Simone Rocha’s runway shows frequently and has caught her in the backstage melee knows she has a tendency to speak dreamily, filling her speech with references that can be a little hard to follow.
Not the Simone Rocha I met a couple of Mondays ago; sitting in her office, in her new headquarters on Dalston Lane, the designer is concise and sharply aware of all activity at her eponymous company. It’s a cliché in fashion journalism to write about how design credentials or talent isn’t enough to build a fashion brand, that you also need business savvy. But Rocha is a perfect example of that.
“I like to keep my cards close to my chest, and when I am at the show, I really want to focus on the collection. Even the way I write the show notes; I don’t like to spell out what the inspiration was, I want to give room for interpretation. I want to give people license to have their own opinions about the clothes. But when it comes to the actual label and the business side of things, you have to be very strict,” she tells me.
%2520(1).jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
In a time when most London brands are still reeling from Brexit, Covid and the collapse of Matches (not to mention the tariffs war and general malaise), the house of Simone Rocha is not just still standing but developing at a steady pace. Which has always been the founder’s intention. “It’s not a race,” she points out. “For me, success is the fact that I have been able to consistently show every season on my own terms.”
At 39 — and with 30 shows under her belt — Rocha is reaching professional maturity. She started her eponymous brand in 2010, shortly after completing her MA in fashion design at Central Saint Martins: “Lulu Kennedy approached me and asked if I wanted to join Fashion East,” she remembers. “I didn’t think about it too much. I just said, ‘Yes, I absolutely want to show.’ And just as it happens with a lot of designers, I ended up showing and starting a brand. But building the business for me was quite a slow process. I started with a small design team, which has grown across sales, production, logistics, etc. Now, I have my own atelier; at the start, I showed on the LFW schedule due to the support from Fashion East and then New Gen. It felt fast in the moment, but in another way it was very slow, step by step.”
She adds that most years the company experiences double-digit growth: “We have worked hard and have been fortunate to be able to deliver profits each year since our inception,” she says.
There’s a little over 70 employees working across the UK, Europe and North America and as a testament to growth, in May 2025 they moved into a new studio in Dalston. Sleek and tidy with lots of yet-to-be-filled surfaces, the space feels like the headquarters of a business on the brink of swelling. “It’s a shame I couldn’t bring a photographer along,” I tease as we walk through the rows of desks and shiny new Mac screens. “I need to have a show under my belt before I can feel this place as home,” Rocha responds.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
A DTC pioneer
The brand itself has a home in 190 stores, across 37 countries. Five of those stores (in London, New York, Hong Kong and two in Taipei) are flagship and all five are profitable according to the company. Wholesale accounts for 65 per cent of sales, while the rest are direct-to-consumer (DTC).
Having opened her first store on London’s Mount Street in 2015, less than five years after she founded the brand, Rocha is quite the DTC pioneer. Selling directly to customers may be the trend now, following the struggles of online retail, but few designers of her generation were able to foresee the opportunity before disaster hit. In fact, many remain heavily reliant on wholesalers.
“The one thing that helped sustain the business throughout Brexit, Covid and every other challenge was having my own retail,” she says. “It allowed me to have this constant dialogue with our customers that has been instrumental to our success. Knowledge is power, and fashion is such a living, breathing thing. I get my store reports every day. I know every single piece that goes to the till every day. It also gives me more license to go out there with the collections, if I know that some things are safeguarded — that the collections can be produced and delivered and the machine is working. You do the things that need to be done so that you can do the things you want to do.”
The designer credits Dover Street Market’s Adrian Joffe and Rei Kawakubo as well as Sarah Andelman, who back then ran pivotal Parisian boutique Collete, with her retail beginnings. “They attended my first show with Fashion East and bought my collection and I had to produce it. That’s how I started structuring this company and it was the relationship with wholesalers that opened my eyes to the power of retail. I owe a lot of my longevity to having this good split of wholesale and owned and operated retail.”
Her parents, John and Odette Rocha, who together built John Rocha – one of the most ubiquitous British fashion labels of the 1990s and early noughties –, are also to thank for her acumen. “I have worked alongside my parents for many years and they’ve consulted on the business,” she says. “Especially the retail part, which I built alongside my mother.”
Rocha continues: “I’ve always seen myself as a London-based label that can be found anywhere. The people that I aspired to be like were designers like Rick Owens and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. They also always had a strong retail footprint. A runway show is such an intimate thing. I need to be able to give the customer the opportunity to come into the store and really experience the collections.”
Outlets for self-expression
The collections revolve around the distinctly Simone Rocha aesthetic she calls “grounded femininity”: a mix of voluminous silhouettes, deconstructed garments and romantic details such as pearls, flowers and other embellishments. Ready-to-wear accounts for 60 per cent of sales, while accessories, which Rocha introduced early in her career, make up 40 per cent.
Rocha has also been smart to ensure there is a range of prices that allows her to meet every customer at their level. A puff-sleeve biker jacket currently listed on the brand’s website retails at £2,695 and a pair of jacquard socks at £50. Most items sit between the £400 and £600 mark.
“From the beginning, there would be pieces in the collection that could become their own little incubators of the brand universe that people could step into more easily. Pieces that could work for our retailers. It’s why we always had accessories, and why we introduced things like the cotton poplin jerseys — core pieces that really carry my identity,” she explains.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
In September 2022, Rocha launched her menswear line, and developing it is one of this year’s priorities. About 10 looks from that collection will be shown alongside womenswear at the show taking place in the City, London’s historic financial district, this coming Sunday, before a 30-strong lookbook is released a few weeks later.
“For me, whether it’s men’s or women’s, it’s all an expression of the same brand. But my job as a designer is to provide the customer with outlets for self-expression. To do that, I have to present it in a space where they feel invited, whether it’s on the menswear or the womenswear floor. You just need to be there, willing to propose something,” she offers.
Another way Rocha grew her company from indie label to international brand is through collaborations; like taking part in the inaugural Moncler Genius project from 2018 to 2020, being H&M’s guest designer in 2021, and her widely lauded takeover of Jean Paul Gaultier Couture in January 2024. In October 2024, she also released her first monograph with Rizzoli.
Considering her growing fame, has she not been tempted to leave London for Paris or Milan?
“I absolutely adored doing Jean Paul Gaultier, and it was an incredible opportunity to work in Paris,” Rocha replies. “But the one thing that experience really gave me was perspective. I was also working on the book at that time, and it all made me feel really proud of what I do here for my own label and for what I’ve built. It didn’t make me want to find an additional creative director role. I dipped my toe in Paris with Jean Paul Gautier and with Moncler, I got to show in Milan — and I got a lot from that. But for me, it’s about: where can I put on the best show? And today, that’s London.”